{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
